Father Oneko, 46, had never counseled parishioners like those he found here at St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church. Many are active-duty or retired military families coping with debt, racial prejudice, multiple deployments to war zones and post-traumatic stress disorder. Nor did he have any idea how to lead the multimillion-dollar fund-raising campaign the parishioners had embarked on, hoping to build an octagonal church with a steeple to replace their red brick parish hall.

Cutting his sermons short was, in some ways, the least of Father Oneko’s worries when he arrived here in 2004. He did not understand the African-American experience. He had never dealt with lay people so involved in running their church. And yet, in the end, the families of his church would come to feel an affinity with their gentle new pastor, reaching out to him in his hour of need, just as he had tended to them in theirs.

You know, following up on the comments from the first part of this series, the late Dean Hoge (a Presbyterian, who worked at Catholic University) separated priests into those who believed in “servant leadership” from those who believed in the priesthood as a sacral office. A lot of the comments seem to fall along those lines as well. That’s where a lot of these discussions end, it seems to me.

The “servant leadership” model was never advocated by Vatican II, if you read the documents, at least that was not the primary model intended for the priesthood. At base, the servant leadership model is a “wink and a nod” at the priesthood. It tells people that, while the priest is at the altar, he’s really just “one of us.” The concept of an “alter Christus” is left by the wayside.

Furthermore, the idea that all Catholics were supposed to be “holy” was not a new one for the Catholic Church, either. All you have to do is look at Jean-Francois Millet’s “The Angelus (1857),” to take but one example. People realized the need to pursue holiness and it was part of their daily lives. What is new is the need to pursue holiness in the most obvious, most strident way possible, calculated to call the most attention to themselves.

But the call to universal holiness still cannot deny that there is a hierarchy to the Church. If there were not, there wouldn’t be ordination or the special call of the religious orders. One can be a saint without being a priest. But not all of us have a special call to be a priest or a member of a religious order. That involves a radical giving-up of oneself to God.